Self-Organised Criticality in Social Networks

Social networks in communities, markets, and societ ies self-organise through the interactions of many individuals. In this paper we use a well-known mech anism of social interactions -the balance of sentiment in triadic relations- to model the evolu tion of social networks. Our model contrasts with many existing network models, in that people not on ly establish but also break up relations while the network evolves. The procedure generates several in teresting network features such as a variety of degree distributions and degree correlations. The r esulting network converges under certain conditions to a steady critical state where temporal disruptio ns in triangles follow a power-law distribution.